Dementium: The Ward was quite possibly the first survival horror game to come to the DS, and even with its flaws it was a niche success. Later, Dementium II came in 2010 and took the good bits from the first game, improved on them and established a strong cult following. Playing a horror game on the go is something which was never experienced before the Dementium series and following the success of the series, it has been re-released with upgraded visuals in Dementium II HD for PC.

You play as William, a fresh-out-of-surgery mental patient who must navigate his way through a creepy, monster infested asylum. As you explore the dark and dingy corridors you will get a sense of Silent Hill, with the landscape changing as you move through the game world. You will experience the normal sights of a crazed mental asylum while waiting for it to shift into a hellish nightmare of ghoulish monsters.

Encounters with monsters can become predictable, mostly when the reality shifts just before a battle and has a Devil May Cry location lockdown mechanic where you need to kill the horde of monsters to unlock the area once more. Later in the game, encounters become less obvious and more open, enabling you to enter and exit buildings if you need a moment’s break between hacking up half-dead corpses with mouths where their stomach should be. Most monsters are easy to deal with and only become slightly trickier in numbers but all come with the awkward movement, groans and misaligned limbs which are the stuff of nightmares.

Boss battles are harder than the average enemies but fall into the trap of being very pattern based, allowing you to fend them off with your wide range of weapons. A varied arsenal of weapons is available, from a knife, shotgun, handgun and machine gun with some other interesting weapons like a sledge hammer.

When not in combat you will find yourself exploring the parallel worlds, solving puzzles and evading weird enemies which you can’t kill, only avoid. The two world concept is good and even though it has been used before, it still has a fresh feel to it in Dementium II HD. The game is not overly scary but has a constant eerie feel to it. The lack of NPC interaction, decent character development and narrative does give the world a very empty, lifeless feel to it but not quite in the way the developers would have intended.

The controls and overall look are where the game’s port origins reveal themselves. On a smaller screen with a touchscreen it makes a lot of sense but with a keyboard and mouse the controls for combat always feel a little sloppy. The 4 – 6 hour campaign is fairly short for a PC game and can be finished in a single sitting for most PC gamers.

Overall Dementium II HD is not bad, but it was never going to be the must have of the genre on PC, where it has so much more competition. Enemies are interesting but simple. Guns and weapons are varied but standard and the story is filled with typical horror tropes seen in most games of the genre. For a horror game it never feels very scary but tense moments and an overall creepy vibe keep the tension alive during gameplay. If you liked the handheld versions you will probably like this one and if you’re a horror fan then this will keep you interested, but it just lacked polish and function because of its handheld roots.